Joseph Anton: A Memoir (59 page)

Sameen said that her friend Kishu, a surgeon in New York, had told her that with an invasive cancer of this sort one shouldn’t mess about but go ahead and have the mastectomy. Yet the no-mastectomy route had lifted Clarissa’s spirits immeasurably. It was so hard to know how to advise her. She did not want his advice.

His lawyer Bernie Simons called. The
decree nisi
had gone through and the divorce from Marianne would be complete in a few weeks when they received the decree absolute. Oh, yeah, he remembered. I’m still getting divorced.

He received a message from Bernard-Henri Lévy. It was good news: He was to be offered the
très important
Swiss award, the Prix Colette, the prize of the Geneva Book Fair. He should come to Switzerland
the following week and receive the prize at a grand ceremony at the fair. But the Swiss government declared him an unwelcome visitor and said they would refuse to provide police protection for his visit. He thought of Mr. Greenup saying he was endangering the citizenry by reason of his desire for self-aggrandizement. On this occasion the Swiss Greenups had won. There would be no self-aggrandizement. The citizenry of Switzerland would be safe. All he could do was to make a phone call to the room at the Geneva Book Fair in which the prize was being awarded. BHL made a speech saying that the award had been the unanimous decision of the jury. The jury president, Mme Edmonde Charles-Roux, said that the award was faithful to the “spirit of Colette,” who “fought against intolerance.” However, Colette’s heirs were furious about the award, presumably not agreeing with Mme Charles-Roux that to select Salman Rushdie was “in the spirit of Colette.” They expressed their anger by refusing to allow Colette’s name to be used in future. Thus he became the final winner of the Prix Colette.

He had a nosy neighbor to deal with, an elderly gentleman named Bertie Joel. Mr. Joel came to the gate and said, on the intercom, that he wanted someone to come to his house “in the next fifteen minutes.” Elizabeth was out so one of the team had to go around. Everyone was tense; had Mr. Anton’s secret identity been discovered? But it was just a question of a blocked drain that ran between the two properties. The new head of the protection team, Frank Bishop, was an older, well-spoken, cheerful man, and a cricket-mad member of the Marylebone Cricket Club. It turned out that Bertie Joel was a member too and had known Frank’s father. The cricket connection erased all suspicions. “The builders told me that the whole house was being steel plated, so I suspected Mafia connections,” said Bertie Joel, and Frank laughed it off and put him at his ease. When he came back and told everyone what had happened the team was almost hysterical with relief. “Got a result there, Joe,” Frank said. “It’s a result, that is.”

There were other such moments. The electric gates jammed open one day and a man looking exactly like the poet Philip Larkin wandered
in and peered around the forecourt. On another day there was a man on the sidewalk with a stepladder, trying to take pictures of the house over the hedge. It turned out he was doing a newspaper story about repossessions of houses on the street. On yet another day there was a man on a motorbike and a Volvo parked across the street containing three men who were “acting strangely.” On such days he thought,
Maybe there really are killers in the neighborhood and I really am about to be killed
. But all of these were false alarms. The house was not “blown.”

Bernie Simons was suddenly dead; sweet, indispensable Bernie, solicitor to a whole generation of the British left, the wisest and warmest of human beings, who had helped him fight the Muslim cases against him and been an invaluable ally in the battle against Howley and Hammington’s threat to withdraw protection. Bernie was only fifty-two. He had been at a conference in Madrid and had just finished dinner, gone upstairs, had an enormous heart attack and plunged face-first toward the rug. A quick end after a good meal. That, at least, was appropriate. All over London people were calling one another to mourn. He spoke to Robert McCrum, Caroline Michel, Melvyn Bragg. To Robert he said, “It’s so terrible—it makes me want to call Bernie and ask him to fix it.”

It was too early to start finding his contemporaries in the obituary pages but the next day Bernie was there, as Angela had been, and as he feared Clarissa might soon be. And Edward Said had CLL, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and Gita Mehta had a cancer too and was being operated on. The wings, the beating wings. He was the one who was supposed to die but people were dropping all around him.

In early June, Elizabeth drove Clarissa to Hammersmith Hospital for another bout of exploratory surgery. The outcome was hopeful. The surgeon, Mr. Linn, said he could “see no more cancer.” So maybe they had caught it early enough, and she would live. Clarissa was very sure that it was good news. Radiotherapy would zap any cells that remained and since “only one, the smallest one” of the lymph nodes was infected she could do without chemotherapy, she thought. He had his doubts but held his tongue.

Edward Said told him that his white count was going up and he might need chemotherapy soon. “But I’m a walking miracle,” he said. His doctor was the man who had “written the book” on CLL, a Long Island physician of Indian origin named Dr. Kanti Rai; the stages of the illness were known as the “Rai stages” because of his work on defining the nature of the disease. So Edward, who had been something of a hypochondriac until he got really sick, whereupon he immediately became a courageous hero, had the best of all possible doctors and was fighting the illness with all his might. “You’re a walking miracle, too,” he said. “The two of us have no right to be alive but here we are.” He said he had seen an interview with Ayatollah Sanei of the Bounty in
The New York Times
. “He has a cartoon of you burning in hell on the wall behind his head. He said,
The road to Paradise will be easier when Rushdie is dead
.” Edward’s huge giggle of a laugh erupted as his arms waved to dismiss the Bountiful One’s remark.

On his forty-sixth birthday he had friends to the house for dinner. By this time there was a list of people the Special Branch approved of, close friends they had come to know over the years, and knew to be closemouthed and trustworthy. Bill Buford brought an excellent Côtes du Rhone and Gillon brought Puligny-Montrachet. There was a hammock from Pauline Melville and a very nice blue linen shirt from Nigella. John Diamond was lucky to be alive after a bus jumped a red light and hit his car at 40 mph right on the driver’s door. Fortunately, the door had held.

Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter brought a limited edition of Harold’s poems. (If Harold had your fax number these poems would arrive from time to time and needed to be praised as soon as possible. One of the poems was named “Len Hutton” after the great England batsman.
I saw Len Hutton in his prime / Another time / Another time
. That was it. Harold’s great friend and fellow playwright Simon Gray neglected to comment on this piece and Harold called him up to reproach him. “I’m sorry, Harold,” Simon said. “I haven’t had time to finish it.” Mr. Pinter didn’t see the joke.)

The prominent Algerian writer and journalist Tahar Djaout was shot in the head and died, the third major intellectual, after Farag Fouda in Egypt and Ugur Mumcu in Turkey, to be murdered in a year. He tried to draw attention to their cases in the Western media but there was only a little interest. His own campaign seemed to be stalling. Christopher Hitchens had heard from the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Robin Renwick, that any meeting with Clinton would not take place before the autumn at the earliest. Frances and Carmel quarreled often and then they both quarreled with him. He expressed his near-despair to them and insisted that they get their own show back on the road and they rallied.

He made a second trip to Paris to speak at a gathering of the Académie Universelle des Cultures in a grand chamber at the Louvre full of gilt, frescoes, and writers: Elie Wiesel, Wole Soyinka, Yashar Kemal, Adonis, Ismail Kadare, Cynthia Ozick … and Umberto Eco. He had just given Eco’s novel
Foucault’s Pendulum
the worst review he had ever given any book. Eco bore down upon him and then behaved with immense good grace. He spread his arms and cried, “Rushdie! I am the boolsheet Eco!” After that they were on excellent terms. (In times to come they joined forces with Mario Vargas Llosa to form a literary triple act that Eco named the Three Musketeers, “because first we were enemies and now we are friends.” Vargas Llosa had criticized Salman for being too left-wing, Eco had criticized Mario for being too right-wing, and Salman had criticized Eco’s writing, but when they met they got on famously. The Three Musketeers performed successfully in Paris, London and New York.)

The security arrangements were insanely excessive. The good men of the RAID had forced the Louvre Museum to close for the day. There were vast numbers of men with machine guns everywhere. He was not allowed to stand near a window. And at lunchtime when the writers walked across to the I. M. Pei glass pyramid to go downstairs for lunch the RAID forced him to sit in a car that drove perhaps one hundred yards to the pyramid from the wing of the Louvre where the Académie had met, with armed men in mirrored sunglasses walking all around it, heavy weaponry at the ready. It was worse than crazy; it was embarrassing.

At the end of the day the security forces informed him that the interior minister, Charles Pasqua, had refused him permission to spend the night in France, because it would be too expensive. But, he argued, he had been offered private accommodation at the homes of Bernard-Henri Lévy, Bernard Kouchner and Christine Ockrent, and Jack Lang’s daughter Caroline, so it would cost nothing at all.
Well, then, it is because we have identified a specific threat against you so we cannot guarantee your safety
. Not even the Special Branch believed that lie. “They would have shared that information with us, Joe,” said Frank Bishop, “and they did not.” Caroline Lang said, “If you want to defy the RAID order we will all squat here in the Louvre with you, and bring in beds and wine and friends.” That was a funny and touching idea but he refused. “If I do that they will never let me enter France again.” Then Christopher Mallaby refused to allow him to stay at the embassy; but someone, the British or the French, managed to persuade British Airways to fly him back to London. So for the first time in four years he flew, without any problems from crew or passengers—many of whom came up to express their friendship, solidarity and sympathy—on a BA plane. After the trip, however, British Airways said that the flight had been agreed to under French pressure “at the local operational level” and they had taken steps “to ensure that it would never happen again.”

U2’s giant
Zooropa
tour arrived at Wembley Stadium, and Bono called him to ask if he’d like to come out on stage. U2 wanted to make a gesture of solidarity, and this was the biggest one they could think of. Amazingly the Special Branch did not object. Maybe they didn’t think there would be many Islamic assassins at a U2 gig, or perhaps they just wanted to see the show. He took Zafar and Elizabeth with him and for the first half of the show they sat in the stadium and watched it. When he got up to go backstage Zafar said, “Dad … don’t sing.” He had no intention of singing, and U2 were even less keen on letting him, but to tease his teenage son he said, “I don’t see why not. It’s quite a good backing band, this Irish band, and there are eighty thousand people out here, so … maybe I’ll sing.” Zafar looked agitated. “You don’t understand, Dad,” he said. “If you sing, I’ll have to kill myself.”

Backstage he found Bono in his MacPhisto outfit—the gold lamé suit, the white face, the little red velvet horns—and in a few minutes they worked out a little bit of dialogue for them to do. Bono would pretend to call him on his cellphone and while they were “talking” he would walk out on stage. When he went on he understood what it felt like to have eighty thousand people cheering you on. The audience at the average book reading—or even at a big gala night like the PEN benefit in Toronto—was a little smaller. Girls tended not to climb onto their boyfriends’ shoulders, and stage diving was discouraged. Even at the very best literary events, there were only one or two supermodels dancing by the mixing desk. This was bigger.

When he wrote
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
it was useful to have some sense of what it felt like to be out there under the weight of all that light, unable to see the monster that was roaring at you from the dark. He did his best not to trip over any of the cables. After the show Anton Corbijn took a photograph for which he persuaded him to exchange glasses with Bono. For one moment he was allowed to look godlike in Mr. B’s wraparound Fly shades, while the rock star peered at him benignly over his uncool literary specs. It was a graphic expression of the difference between the two worlds that had, thanks to U2’s generous desire to help him, briefly met.

A few days later Bono called, talking about wanting to grow as a writer. In a rock group the writer just became a sort of conduit for the feelings in the air, the words didn’t drive the work, the music did, unless you came from a folk tradition like Dylan, but he wanted to change.
Would you sit down and talk about how you work
. He wanted to meet new people, different people. He sounded hungry for mind food and for what he called
just a good row
. He offered his house in the south of France. He offered friendship.